Stardance - Spider & Jeanne Robinson

**** Dancing in the vacuum

The plot of this book certainly doesn’t lack originality, as it attempts to narrate dance, which is already difficult, but above all to do it in a science fiction context. The novel tells the story of Shara, a talented dancer who will never become famous because of her physical peculiarities (she doesn’t have a minute body) and who then invents a new type of dance in zero gravity: a star dance.
And in some ways the attempt is also quite good. In the scenes in which the narrator, the cameraman (and ex-dancer) Charlie, describes the choreography of Shara, for example, one almost has the impression of seeing her dance through the filming. The prose of the author (or rather, of the authors, because Robinson’s wife is also listed as author) is evocative and engaging here. The very fact of picking up a science fiction book and finding yourself reading about dance is strange, but in a good way. As long as the science fiction aspect remains in the background, actually, reading is pleasant and you are curious to find out what happens next.
Problems arise when science fiction comes up and shatters all the poetry.
Unfortunately, the novel suffers from being written over forty years ago. It isn’t just a problem of technological anachronisms, which as always are inevitable in books that try to imagine the future. In fact, there are numerous scientific inaccuracies. Some are probably due to the fact that at that time there was little knowledge on the effects on the human body of exposure to microgravity for long periods, but for others one cannot appeal to such an excuse, because they are relatively simple concepts of physics. I don’t know if these last mistakes are due to artistic licences by the authors or if they are the result of poor research. The problem is that some essential turning points of the plot are based on some of these inaccuracies and consequently the plot itself ends up losing credibility.
However, this is a pleasant reading that I decided to judge positively precisely because of its originality.


Stardance of Amazon.

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